


He Was Like The Flood Last Winter

by historia_vitae_magistras



Series: The tulips make me want... [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical Hetalia, Historical References, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 13:15:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13975899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras
Summary: In 1953, the North Sea rose and rose and rose. With the waters came destruction. With the waters came death. With the waters, came Matthew.





	He Was Like The Flood Last Winter

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 1st, 1953

It was a good, bustling morning. Cold in a way that would frost your very bones. Clouds crossed the sky, white and stark against the bright sun that bleached them. The hauled their own shadows away, revealing his Montreal: as sprawling and meticulous as the veins of his own body. Matt lay in bed late—his lazy Sunday routine—only really waking up after the sun had risen high in the sky. When he finally got up and took a whiff of clean artic air coming down from the north, it shook him awake, sent a jolt of joy through him. When he grinned, the sun smiled back and pulled him outside for a Sunday spent walking the city.

The icy cobblestones of the old city were as familiar to him as the calluses on his palms. He walked down streets that seemed longer and brighter every day, stretching out like a ribbon unfurling in a fit of creativity and never reeled back. The hard work of the hundreds of thousands of souls shoved into this wedge of islands and river banks.

Halfway through the afternoon, he stopped at his usual bakery. Nestled into a grey stone and snow-blown boulevard, there was still steam in the display cases of bagels and pastries, waiting for the crowd that would trickle in when after mass. The black iron bell on the door rang its announcement of his entry as it had every day for the better part of 100 years. He nodded a smile to the baker’s daughter and ordered his usual coffee and bagel. She was the cheerful, plump sort of Quebecois, the kind that was prettier for the flour clinging to her apron and cloud of her curls. The shop windows fogged up and his bagel still warm in its paper as he spotted the newspaper. The clerk had just arranged a bundle out on the counter.

“How much?”

The morning headlines were fresh off the press, ink still shiny. The baker’s daughter waved his money away and handed him a copy. Matt smiled at her. She had a bit of her mother about her face, a hard woman who had also once flirted with him shyly from behind the bakery counter. He returns her smile but retreated with his breakfast and coffee to the far corner. Eight years since the war but a hard edge of nervousness still crept down his spine when he had to sit in the open without any cover. The paper read nothing unusual. New cars, new dresses, plump women, high stocks, low unemployment. His factories were full, his farms productive. He ate, read, enjoyed the warmth that slowly made it's through his good wool sunday suit from the window. Leaning into one hand, warm and full and content, he read about his own success. The baker’s daughter filled his coffee twice, refused his coins twice. She’d tied her apron around her narrow waist tighter, smoothed her curls back, brushed away the flour. She compliments his suit, and Matt tells her its new, that he’s grown an inch. He doesn’t tell her he’s grown an inch because Labrador and Newfoundland have finally been added to the country. She asks him if he’s ever been to the dances down in the church hall. Shaking his head, he vaguely nods his no at her. He’s not thinking of the girl, or his coffee or the dance she’s obviously baiting him to ask her too. Because there, on the on the third page reads a headline that grabs at him.

“North Sea Terrorises”

He says no thank you to her reference to the dance and she finally gave up. Good for her, he thinks dimly. Her mother had taken years. He flipped through pages of his new queen comforting bedraggled Englishmen and vaguely wondered if he should send his father something, decided against sending anything but some coffee and soupe de pauvreté and then sighed because Tabarnak, he’d really been in Montreal too long. Shaking his head at himself, he scanned the pages and below more pictures of the queen was the tagline,

“Unprecedented flooding strikes Holland,”

He stopped cold.  

* * *

 

3,500 miles away, Johan was fucked. Utterly, utterly fucked.

The weather had rolled in fast, pushing rolls of doughy silver clouds across the horizon. With it had come wind and water and waves. Wind that scoured skin like rope burn. Water that swelled dark and ate away the beaches like gangrene. The waves that Johan usually fell asleep to had abandoned their heartbeat rhythm to thrash the coast. He’d woken from a dead sleep to threads of pain cutting through his leg, fanning across his knee and calf, but he was old and the pain wasn’t even startling anymore. It was the the roar the elements crashing against his walls that startled him awake, sent him jackknifing up in the bed.But he water had kept coming and rising, rising, rising. He’d limped up the stairs, dragged himself out a window had somehow lifted himself and his bottle of Jenever to the flattest part of his the cottage roof.

And there he had sat, dead drunk and half frozen. Fifteen hours now. The water had rushed up from the little cove his cottage was nestled in and had plateaued a few inches from his outstretched legs. A good thing it had, he’d decided dully, since his right leg was about as useless as tits on a fish. He’d drowned so often before and was in no hurry to try it again.

The voice of the north sea might speak to his soul, her touch might be as light and maternal as van Cleves’ Madonna’s, but Johan was no trusting Christ child in her soft embrace. The sea could consume him any time she wanted to. The sea had her teeth, her whitecaps as deadly and snarling as any predator’s maw. The water, even at rest, even at its most gentle, was a world in which man was an uneasy trespasser. And even with 10 million hearts in his chest, he was still only a man. An uneasy trespasser, clinging to his own roof.

He snorted at his own foolishness and wished his shattered leg would be kind enough to put him out of his misery. A quick death would be a kinder way than drowning. If he were to die here and rest here until his body was recovered, he might come to in a nice morgue, rather than washed up on shore, rotted and swollen, inevitably traumatising some nice family on holiday.

He lost track of time, swaying back and forth, only steady enough to drain the bottle. Hours passed, perhaps an entire night and day. He couldn’t tell anymore, the clouds were so tight and dark around the earth. Around his knee and thigh, there were new spikes of pain that joined the others in a cacophony of agony; each new addition like so many storms converging. With every single one came a cracked explosion of lightning behind his eyes, white and poisonous.

Then, on the horizon, the was a boat. A little white metronome the size of his thumbnail rocking in the distance. He tried to watch it, but he can’t muster the focus He was cold, so goddamn cold. It tightened around him, a sheath of shivering and misery. The little ship was the size of his fist now. He listed to the side, felt the scrape of roof shingles on his cheek and wished he hadn’t polished off so much of the Jenever.

The rain had started up again in thin awl-like little needles that struck his skin like they meant to hurt him. Rain like barbed wire on his face. He watched as the ship approaching, manned by one tall, shadowy figure. Boat like that should have had at least a crew of four or five, he thought dimly. Must be a hell of a sailor on board.

He lost track again. The next time he woke, it was to the sound of  his name. A voice as human and friendly as they came. Johan startled at the sound of it. How…? He sprang up like a jackknife opening and holy shit, it is him. Matthew.

“Nice weather you’re having here, eh?” And there the fucker was. Tall as ever, his broad shoulders stretching his blue sweater. A sweater. In this weather. But he didn't even look cold, wearing a smile as warm as the hands that grasped Johan and began helping him up.

“No! Shit— NO!” Agony shot up his leg and Sweet Christ how was the Rotterdam Blitz less fucking painful than this?

“What’s wrong?” Matt eased him back down.

“Leg,” He managed, through clenched teeth.

“Is it broken?”

“Oh yeah,”  

“Shit,” Matt ran a hand down his face. _“Shit,”_

“Oh yeah,” Johan laid back again, swung the bottle jauntily. “I’m not going anywhere unless you’ve got more of this?”

Matt snatched it up, took a whiff. “What is that? Gin?”

“Heathen,” Johan said and grabbed the bottle back. “Who’d’ve thunk the son of the man who fought six wars for opium wouldn’t know his—” He made a sound that was somewhere between a hiccup and a pained grunt. “Wouldn’t know his liquor,”

“Holy god, you’re completely blitzed,”

Johan raised the bottle in a mock cheer. “Give the kraut my regards,”

Matt raised an eyebrow. “Right, I’ll do that,”

“Wonderful,” Johan flopped back.

“I’ve got a bottle of 30 year old scotch or a shitload of morphine,” Matt said. “What’s your drug of choice?”

“Two surrets and a bottle of scotch should get me to a hospital,”

“I— don’t think those should be mixed,”

“I’m glad you think I give a shit,” Johan laughed. “Drug me or go away,”

Matt snorted. “Right, let me just leave you on a roof when I just flew 3,000 fucking miles to find your sorry ass,”

“You what now?”

“Brace yourself,” Matt jammed the surret of morphine into his thigh and squeezed. Warmth flooded from the spot and raced through his body and oh fuck yeah, that was the good shit. Like spring had come, but instead of days and weeks, he was alive in minutes. His head lolled.

He woke up on the boat, covered in blankets and laying on what felt like… a bag of flour? Sugar? No. Coffee. It was too grainy to be sugar, much less flour. Matt was kneeling over his bad leg with a large knife. Shore was out of sight. His skin crawled.

“What the shit,” Johan asked. “Are you doing?”

Matt looked across at him, before gesturing to Johan’s trousers. "I'm gonna have to cut them to take a look, okay?"

“Oh fuck no,"

“Don’t have a choice,” Matt said firmly. “Now sit still,”

“Can’t I at least have some—”

“Can you even feel me?”

“What? No?”

“Good. Morphine’s still kicking round in there,”

“Matt—”

“Just watch the water, I’ll be as quick as I can,” Johan stared out the side of the boat. The rain poured across the polished sea, engulfed the little boat with a deliberate bite. Johan chewed his lip and nodded shakily, allowing Matt to gently cut the fabric up the front of his leg to just above his knee.

“How bad—”

“Don’t fucking look,” Matt said sharply.

“That good huh?” Johan said. Well fuck, there was a reason they’d put those wicker baskets over his sister’s men who’d just had their legs hacked off during the wars.

“More morphine,” Matt said. “More morphine and you’ll be fine,”

“I’m that fucked huh?”

“You’ll be fine,” Matt said and Johan almost, almost believed it. “It was worse last time,”

Last time. Johan raised a hand to his brow and clutched at the hair there. Last time was fucking Appeldoorn in ‘45. When he’d been 50 pounds lighter than he’d been at the start of the occupation and drowning in his lungs with all the damage the Germans had done to his dams and his levees with their fucking explosives.

“You’ll be fine,” Matt nodded firmly. “Now hold onto your wellies, eh?”

“What?”

There was a needle in his shoulder suddenly, and he knew no more.

He dreamt of the sea. She'd had her hands about his throat since the day he came into this world. If he hadn’t seen his own blood so many times, he might have thought that his cuts would bleed silvery seawater. Salt on his brow: salt in his blood. He floated on the water. Then there is only soft black, pain bleeding away. The next thing he knows Matt had slapped him. Had yanked him upright, yelling. He didn't know why; the words sounded so far away. He didn't know why Matt was so panicked and he didn't give a damn. He had been floating. He wanted to tell Matt to fuck off, but this was _Matt_ after all—so he didn't.

“What?” he muttered faintly.

Matt made a very loud and frustrated sound and something that decidedly sounded like “Fuck it!” He was dragged upward, up to to the mast by the collar, and his leg hurt, but not as much as it had before, though it felt stiff as all hell. He opened his eyes at last, and oh, his leg was splinted and the little boat was at an unnatural angle, prow rising halfway into the air and oh God Matt’s hand on his collar was the only thing keeping him from sliding down the deck and into the dark churning water.

Matt grunted something profane and then there was a rope around his middle.

Matt had tied him to the mast.

He swore and they clutched to each other, Matt awkwardly kneeling behind him, with his hands around Johan and the mast. Matthew thought that they were going to ride this out? Oh, fuck— He scoured a hand through his hair, took a deep breath. Matt was as strong as they came. They would be fine— they would be fine! But oh God there was a swell, there had to be, because they rose into the air again. A wash of water and there was a sick crack of wood on bone on flesh. Matt was there, his arms around him and then suddenly they were flat and Matt… Matt was _gone_.

No!

Johan didn't know if he screamed it. He whipped his head around, squinted, scanning for Matthew’s blond hair or his broad shoulders or any sign of life in the churning grey water. There was nothing. Only white caps and tumbling waves. What the North Sea washed away she rarely brought forth once more. Goddamn shitting _fuck!_ He worked uselessly at Matt’s knots and of course, the bastard had tied some Gordian knot because Johan couldn't make heads or tails of the loops or twists. Goddamnit!

There was a horrible moment of silence. Silence like a flooded field of the dead. He swore, he yelled that Matt better not die because god damn everything, it was _Matt!_ He roared something in Matt’s French that he wasn't sure the meaning of—just that it was angry and profane. He cursed God and the holy grail and smashed his fist into the grains of the planks and maybe for fucking once, God might have been listening and wasn't pissed at him and his usury because the little boat rocked and the sea spat him out. His sweater had torn at the shoulder and he was bleeding from the hairline and puking up water and his lunch but the fucker was _there_ and he was breathing. Breathing. His glasses were lost to the sea. He was wrecked, but he was the best goddamn thing Johan had ever seen. Johan’s voice shot out from him before he could think, his fury rising before he could stop himself.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Johan wouldn't admit it later, but his voice hit an octave higher than usual and the cry was too goddamn hoarse and strained to be anything else.

“Only… had... enough rope,” Matthew spat more seawater. “For one,”

The ream of profanity Johan spat was impressive as Dutch ever got. Matt just shakily got to his feet, did something with the sails and Johan was still hurling abuses at him and God and the sea. When Matt seemed satisfied with his work and Johan was finished yelling, Matt slid behind Ned; soaked, fucking freezing, and trembling. Matt, trembling with cold. It felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Yeah, I was scared too,” Matt said and he and drops his head on Johan's shoulder as if he was exhausted as Johan and fuck, maybe he was. “Sorry,”


End file.
